Android-ready: Rhodes 1.0, Ruby Framework for Mobile Applications

The Rhomobile company out of Cupertino CA and St. Petersburg, Russia promises speedy platform-independent programming using HTML-embedded Ruby code in their Rhodes mobile framework. The mobile platforms supported are Android, Symbian, iPhone, Blackberry and Windows Mobile. The first version of Rhodes came out November 2008 and supported only the iPhone, Blackberry and Windows. Symbian was added in January, and now Android. The company licenses the framework in two ways: GPLv3 for open source projects and on a cost basis for proprietary applications.

Rhomobile considers an ideal use for its Rhodes framework to be connecting mobile applications to software-as-a-solution (SaaS) entities such as customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP). Their own Rhosync product helps synch hosted backend applications with mobile devices. The mobile phone would then execute the Rhodes applications locally. The company emphasizes that application programmers can thereby also access the phone's hardware features, such as its camera.

Downloads of Rhodes 1.0 are available via github and the Ruby installation method gem install rhodes. Some sample applications are provided, such as connecting to SugarCRM.